The Reformation in Switzerland and France 107polygamy, in part because there were four times as many women than men in
town. John of Leiden, who became king of Munster, led the way by taking
sixteen wives. He also ordered the burning of all books in Munster except
the Bible. Forces sent by Lutheran and Catholic princes stormed the town in
June 1535 and tortured to death John of Leiden and other lesser leaders,
placing their mutilated corpses in iron cages that still hang in a church
steeple in Munster.
After the fall of Munster, Dutch Anabaptists led by a former Catholic
priest named Menno Simons (1496—1561) tried to save adult baptism by
preaching disciplined, godly living and Christian pacifism. They became
known as Mennonites, and some of them left for the Americas more than a
century later in search of religious toleration. Other descendants of such
radical reformers include the adult-baptizing Hutterites of Moravia, the
forebears of a group who settled in the American Midwest and the Canadian
prairies. Likewise, the Unitarian religion has roots in this period, deriving
from the Anti-Trinitarian views of God as being one, not the trinity of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jean Calvin and Reform
France, too, provided fertile ground for reform. The French monarchy had
traditionally maintained a stubborn independence from Rome. Pope Leo X
had signed the Concordat of Bologna (1516) with King Francis I, giving
the king the right to appoint bishops and abbots in France. Initially the Val
ois ruler was far more preoccupied with his wars against Charles V and the
Habsburgs than with the stormy tracts of an obscure German monk. The
threat of heresy, however, convinced him in 1521 to order Luther’s writ
ings confiscated and burned. Yet Protestant propaganda arrived in France
from Germany. In 1534, reformers affixed placards in Paris denouncing
the Mass and on the king’s bedroom door in his chateau at Amboise. The
“affair of the placards” convinced the king to combat reform in earnest.
Jean Calvin (1509-1564) embodied the second major current of the
Reformation. He was born in the small town of Noyon in northern France,
where his father worked as a secretary to the local bishop. Calvin’s mother
died when he was about five years old, and his father sent him to Paris to be
trained as a priest. He then decided that his son should become a lawyer,
because he might earn more money.
Late-Renaissance humanism and particularly the teachings of Erasmus
helped stimulate in the pious young Calvin an interest in religious reform
during his legal studies. In 1534, the Catholic hierarchy and the king him
self moved to crush this movement. Finding exile in the Swiss town of Basel,
Calvin probably still considered himself a follower of Erasmus within the
Catholic Church. In Basel, he penned tracts denouncing the papacy and call
ing on the king of France to end religious persecution.